Scrambled Output from db2top

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty addicted to db2top. I started using it way back when it was a download from Alphaworks. It is simply unparalleled for free real-time monitoring for DB2. No, it’s not full enough of a feature set to be your only monitoring tool, but I can barely troubleshoot a locking issue any more without it. I tried last night, and it took me four times as long, at least.

Why did I even try to troubleshoot an occurring issue without db2top? Well, I have these nifty new AIX servers that were allocated by someone in another country. And every time I try db2top on them, I got something that looked like this:
db2top_problem
I can see a few parts that look like db2top there, but nothing readable, and it doesn’t get better if I change the screen size or if I hit a key to get to a different type of screen.

Searching the web brought me to this APAR:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1IC73092

That is for 9.5. I am most certainly not using 9.5. These servers are 10.5, Fixpack 3. I had the same exact problem on 14 servers and 16 instances. My LANG variable was already correct. The ultimate resolution was to add these lines to my instance owner’s .profile:

LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_ALL=

export LC_COLLATE
export LC_CTYPE
export LC_MONETARY
export LC_NUMERIC
export LC_TIME
export LC_MESSAGES
export LC_ALL
Ember Crooks
Ember Crooks

Ember is always curious and thrives on change. She has built internationally recognized expertise in IBM Db2, spent a year working with high-volume MySQL, and is now learning Snowflake. Ember shares both posts about her core skill sets and her journey learning Snowflake.

Ember lives in Denver and work from home

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8 Comments

    • Yes. I’m a tad worried about how these settings will affect me doing updates and such with non-ASCII characters, so we’ll see how that goes.

    • That leads to some interesting colors when working with a white background in iterm2. Not sure if I care enough about the colors to go back to working on a black background.

      Screen shot of this method when using iterm2 and a white background.

  1. You can easily run db2top remote. Just install express-C on a linux PC (or linux virtual machine inside your windows desktop) and catalog all your remote databases there. Just start db2top on linux passing the required parameters and you get the best presentation.
    This way you also monitor the DB2 databases running on windows, which do not have db2top (then again you have the good-old db2mon over there).
    Combined with a nice desktop or tmux you can monitor many databases simultaneously.

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